juliendouvier

What an odd, damaged pair they made, Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett. Both came from families dominated by lying, philandering fathers. Dash idolized his much put-upon mother and hated his father, swearing never to be like him, but went on to become a drunk and a womanizer himself, betraying every woman he was with and running from every possibility of emotional intimacy; Lillian despised her doormat mother and swore never to put up with such betrayal and mistreatment, sure she would never settle for less than devotion and fidelity, yet her most important relationship was with a drunken womanizer incapable of commitment and terrified of intimacy. Their tangled, complicated relationship was the most important in both their lives, but it was never all that either of them wanted; it may, however, have been all that either of them could manage. Their output as writers was strange, too. Dash wrote important, influential work but wrote almost nothing in the last decades of his life, sinking into alcoholism, fatally limited by his refusal to confront deeper emotions in himself or in his fiction, trapped by the model of stoic, defensive masculinity he did so much to represent in his fiction and couldn't get away from in his life. She was an important playwright but her best work was written early on with Dash acting as fierce editor; as he became increasingly unable (or unwilling) to play that role, her plays grew less successful and her confidence shrank. The series of memoirs she published after his death was enormously successful but was full of self-serving obfuscations and outright fabrications; any suggestion that she was ever less than truthful, though, was met with fury. And she was good at fury. Tortured by his refusal to be all to her that she wanted when he lived, she was determined to make him hers after his death. And God help anyone who got in the way. Fierce characters, both of them, not admirable in the whole but compelling and strong.

2023-07-06 19:53